Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs

Yorgos Lanthimos is celebrated for his world-building and absurdist explorations of human relationships, establishing him as one of the most distinctive auteurs in contemporary cinema. This exhibition at Onassis Stegi brings together four bodies of 182 still photographs made over the course of the past five years, offering new perspectives and insight on this unique and singular visionary.

The show includes three photographic series born from the spaces of Lanthimos’ cinema, made on the fringes of film locations in New Orleans and Atlanta, and in the recreated cities built as sets on soundstages in Budapest. Many of the photographs appear in his recent books: "Dear God, the Parthenon Is Still Broken" (2024), comprised of photographs made during the filming of "Poor Things" (2023), and "i shall sing these songs beautifully" (2024), made alongside "Kinds of Kindness" (2024) and “viscin” (2026). Also included are previously unseen photographs made on the set of his latest film "Bugonia" (2025).

The fourth body of work is the first showing anywhere of works from an ongoing body of personal photographs made in his native Greece. Compiled during solitary walks around the edges of the city of Athens and on visits to islands in the Aegean Sea, Lanthimos brings a quiet, meditative eye to focus on the quotidian and mundane, harnessing the medium’s capacity for abstraction and transformation.

Across all of Lanthimos’ photography is a contemplative engagement with the banal and the familiar. He presents this matter-of-factness of subject matter with exquisite clarity and intimacy, representing the world as particular and complex. In a similar vein to his filmmaking, what emerges is a language that is a record of its own making, a luminous picture of phenomena.

Designed in the form of a classical Greek temple, the show creates a central altar-like space which displays 110 new works by Lanthimos, while the outer perimeter presents three bodies of work linked to Lanthimos’ films, so audiences move from his known practice to the inner core of new photographic work.

"Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs" is curated by Michael Mack and commissioned and produced by Onassis Stegi. To coincide with the exhibition opening, Yorgos Lanthimos will launch his new photo book “viscin” (2026).

Michael Mack, curator of this exhibition, comments: “Yorgos Lanthimos is a singular talent in the use of a camera lens to build narratives, and this exhibition establishes his flourishing capacity to elicit emotional and intellectual leaps of faith beyond the frame of a still photograph. The ongoing series of black-and-white works made in Greece away from his filmmaking practice mark a new departure, a turning inwards to a known landscape. Emerging within a long tradition of photography applied to document the man-altered landscape, it also reflects an era of self-reflection and of his advanced progress in developing his own language in photography.”